S 2197 
K4 Z8 
opy 1 





MEMORIAL ADDRESS 



GoL. Thomas Wallace Knox 



DELIVERED AT THE ANNUAL MEETING OF 



THE LOTOS CLUB 



APRIL 6, 1896. 1 



t » » • 



DAVID BANKS SICKELS 



7f>?^»^^ 



.\<^ 



A 



-•? <7- 



■'O'i 









MEMORIAL ADDRESS 

Col. Thomas Wallace Knox 

DHLIVERHD AT THE ANNUAL MEETING OT 

THE LOTOS CLUB 



APRIL 6, 1806. 



DAVID BANKS SICKELS 



^^' 



MEMORIAL ADDRESS 



DELIVERED AT 



THE LOTOS CLUB, 

APRIL 6, 1896. 

In the ceaseless struggle of mankind for the 
life of others there can be no loftier aspiration 
than that which is created by a desire to con- 
tribute to their intellectual profit or pleasure, 
and there is no nobler pursuit than that of an 
author whose works continue to bring sunshine 
to our households long after he has passed 
away. This was the ambition and hope that 
impelled and guided the tireless pen of our 
late, lamented friend and fellow member. 
Colonel Thomas "Wallace Knox. 

Only a few days before he died he said to 
me, ' ' I know that after I am dead and for- 
gotten my books will live. ' ' And here is the 
key-note — sadly sounding down the avenues of 
time — of every grand endeavor. Conscious 
genius lifts her laureled brow and, unmindful 
of her chaplets, thinks only of her darling 
gifts to the world, wondering whether they 
will be treasured as blessed legacies. And 



how many who have toiled and struggled and 
hoped, not alone for recognition while living, 
but for the assurance of something imper- 
ishable '' when life's fitful fever is over," have 
been forgotten and their books buried in the 
sands of oblivion. 

But if in this age the principles of altruism 
shall ultimately predominate over that spirit 
of avarice which Tennyson describes as ' ^ Each 
hand lusting for all that is not its own, ' ' then 
the man who adds one item to the fund of 
human knowledge will rise to the highest 
dignity that can be attained in the great scale 
of being. Then the names of men who seemed 
to be illustrious while living may be forgotten, 
the splendid temples reared and adorned by 
human hands may perish, the monuments 
erected to perpetuate the memory of those 
who achieved renown may crumble into dust ; 
but the magic forms of beauty created out of 
the airy fabric of the brain and the ' ' thoughts 
that breathe and words that burn ' ' will sur- 
vive the wreck of time. 

The life and personality of Colonel Knox 
were altogether unique, and were the outgrowth 
of those phenomenal opportunities afforded by 
American civilization and American institu- 
tions. Born in a little village of New Hamp- 
shire, of parents who were the descendants of 
stalwart, old John Knox, the Scottish Keformer, 
and noted for their rigid conservatism, in 



early life he found his way to Boston, where 
the trammels of Puritanism which had fettered 
his early childhood were broken and a larger 
liberty of thought and action secured. There' 
he studied with all the ardor of the most- 
ambitious student, until he was enabled tO' 
impart to others the attainments of his 
unwearied scholarship ; so that when he was 
only eighteen years of age he became the 
teacher of others who were older than himself^ 
Before he was twenty-two years of age he- 
established an academy at Kingston, N. H., 
but adverse circumstances forced him to relin- 
quish the enterprise, and when the alluring 
rumors of newly-discovered fields of fabulous 
wealth in Colorado reached him, he gathered 
up the few dollars he had saved and counting 
the cost decided to journey thither. On his 
arrival at Denver he discovered that his 
exchequer was sadly depleted and it became 
necessary to seek employment, which he soon 
obtained, as a special reporter of the Denver 
Daily JVews, and subsequently, while thus 
engaged, he also became the western corres- 
pondent of a number of eastern journals. 

At the outbreak of the war he was amongst 
the first in the field, and served in the Army 
of the Southwest as a volunteer aide. Subse- 
quently he was appointed Lieutenant- Colonel 
and Aide- de- Camp on the staff of the Com- 
mander-in-Chief of the National Guard of 



California by Governor Frederick F. Lane. 
When not on duty lie was busy with his 
facile pen, and his graphic accounts of long 
and weary marches, skirmishes and battle- 
scenes, won for him the high regard of news- 
paper men in this and other eastern cities. 
At the close of the war he came to New York 
and soon after made his first journey around 
the world, writing vivid descriptions for the 
press of his visit to eastern lands. Subse- 
quently he made frequent trips to other 
foreign countries and traversed nearly every 
known region of the earth. He had travelled 
many thousands of miles more than Bayard 
Taylor, and, with the single exception of 
Frank Yincent, more than any other noted 
American. 

It was during one of his periodical tours 
(in 1877) that he reached the shores of Siam, 
and in that unfrequented and far-off corner of 
the world he was my guest for several weeks, 
visiting the palaces of royalty and the bunga- 
lows of the lowly, the gorgeous temples of 
the Buddhists and the humble chapels of the 
missionaries. We travelled together through 
the jungles many miles in the interior of the 
country by elephants and bullock-carts and 
native boats. 

Just before his departure for Singapore I 
had the pleasure of presenting him to the 
King, and as he was the only American His 



Majesty had seen for several years, except the 
official representatives of our Government, 
and the Presbyterian missionaries, he invited 
us to his summer palace at Bang-pa-in, where 
we remained nearly an entire day and fully 
half a night together, enjoying all the luxuries 
that an Oriental sovereign could furnish to his 
guests, and conversing in a familiar manner 
upon subjects of general interest. On this 
occasion Colonel Knox explained with great 
care and in detail the methods and operations 
of our educational institutions, which greatly 
interested the King, and two years later it 
was a source of more than ordmary gratifica- 
tion to me to be permitted to inform the 
Department of State that His Majesty had 
inaugurated a system of public instruction 
predicated largely on the lines which Colonel 
Knox had suggested. A few weeks after my 
good friend's departure. His Majesty remarked 
to me : * ^ If all Americans were like Colonel 
Knox what a splendid race you would have in 
your country." 

The works that Colonel Knox has left us, 
especially his series of ' ' Boy Travellers, ' ' are 
monuments of his industrious research and wide 
experience. His pen was not skilled in the art 
of portraying the plastic imagery of fancy's 
enchanted landscape. He saw things as they 
were, and painted them as he saw them, and 
made, as Kobert Louis Stevenson said, '*the 
7 



right kind of thing fall out in the right Mnd 
of place ; the right kind of thing follow, and 
not only the characters talk aptly and think 
naturally, but all the circumstances answer 
one to another like the notes in music." If 
he appeared at times to indulge at all in exag- 
geration it was because the scene he depicted 
was made up of a multiplication of anomalous 
and incongruous forms and figures, but not 
less faithfully portrayed because so seemingly 
unreal, as things often seem to those who are 
unfamiliar with untraveled countries. 

It may be said of his writings that they are 
characterised by a fascinating simpKcity of 
style, a purity of diction, and an unaffected 
tenderness of thought; and he might have 
truthfully said of himself, as did the author of 
the ' ' Pleasures of Hope, ' ' during his last days 
on earth : * ' When I am gone, justice will be 
done to me in this way : it will be said 
that I was a pure writer, and now it is an 
inexpressible comfort to me to be able to look 
back and feel that I have not written one line 
against religion or virtue. ' ' 

His sterling traits of character and predilec- 
tions have been accurately and admirably por- 
trayed by his old and intimate friend, Junius 
Henri Browne, who says : 

<< He was a true son of New England, and 
American through and through; in the best 
sense of the word a Democrat, a man without 
8 



the least pretense or affectation, a believer in 
hard work and honest purpose. No man has 
ever been more strictly, more absolutely just. 
It is not too much to say that he was the 
embodiment of justice in every act of his 
checkered career. He had often said that if 
all men were just, there would be no need of 
generosity, which is only made necessary in 
order to supply the deficiencies of what 
assumes to be justice, and is exactly the 
opposite. 

^' He was an unflinching believer in law and 
order. 

^ ' Exceedingly conservative and practical, he 
had no love of theory, no fondness for specu- 
lation, no care to solve problems of any sort. 
He revered facts, and of them he was always 
an ardent supporter. Very patient with the 
existing order of things, for whose original 
existence he thought there must have been 
entirely sound reason, he could have lived in 
a despotism with a certain degree of content- 
ment, fervid lover of liberty though he was. 
If he had not been able to endure the despot- 
ism, he would have gone elsewhere, rather 
than plot against it, or attempt its overthrow. 

**Many of Colonel Knox's acquaintances 
failed to understand him, he was so invariably 
upright, so uncompromising as to what he con- 
sidered to be right. He sometimes gave offence, 
no doubt, by saying precisely what he be- 



lieved ; and yet he was uniformly polite when 
politeness did not involve falsehood or 3ome 
other form of insincerity. He would never 
ask any person to do anything for him that he 
would not gladly do for that person. He 
never paid idle compliments; he never flat- 
tered ; he never had ulterior motives ; he was 
ever frank, direct, trustworthy. He was 
never known to borrow money, though he 
would frequently lend to anyone he esteemed 
to be honest. But he detested, from the bot- 
tom of his soul, any man who could in any 
manner be suspected of ' dead-beatism. ' Of 
his charities he seldom spoke, and they were 
many and constant. He would always give, 
according to his means, to any person or cause 
that was needy and deserving. 

<'His books were like himself, wholly honest 
and painstaking, simple and straightforward. 
In a literary way, he had made the most of 
himself, and he was quietly proud of what he 
had accomplished by untiring industry, patient 
research, extreme conscientiousness and unques- 
tionable talent. Character, however, was his 
sovereign distinction. He was a model Ameri- 
can, a pattern for the rising generation. 

' ' If every citizen of the country were all that 
he was, this would be an ideal Eepublic." 

Colonel Knox was a true Lotosian in all that 
the word implies. His club was his castle 
that he was always ready to protect and 
10 



defend. He was a member of other clubs, 
but the Lotos was his favorite abiding place, 
to which he clung with a feeling of fondness 
somewhat akin to that which home alone 
inspires. He was one of its constituent mem- 
bers, and for several years at different periods 
performed the duties of vice-president and 
secretary, devoting considerable time to its 
interests. And now, as we no longer behold 
his kindly face in the old familiar places, our 
thoughts instinctively turn towards the mys- 
terious, unknown realms of the departed, and 
we are led to exclaim in the language of 
Longfellow : 

** Traveller! in what realms afar, 
In what planet, in what star, 
In what vast, aerial space 
Shines the light upon thy face? 
In what gardens of delight, 
Kest thy weary feet to-night? '* 



11 



LIBRARY OF CONGRESS 



H 




016 117 875 5 ,, 



t 



